Snehali was sitting in her room gazing through the open window. There was a cup full of tea that was sitting on the table beside her since 20 minutes and was cold now. There was a lot of stuff lying on the bed which made it clear that she was in the process of cleaning up her room. There was Music playing in the background but she was not paying attention to it. It had been about a couple of months since the meeting with the Director and Snehali had to deal with a lot of changes. She had kept busy and it was this weekend that she finally had the time to reflect upon what all had happened.

The higher management of the company where Snehali and Neerav worked had decided that the product they were working on was not meeting the needed goals financially and more investment would not be done in it. The product would run in maintenance mode for 3 months after which the sales would be concluded and the product would be withdrawn from the market. This meant that the team would be disbanded. They were supposed to decide what they wanted to do going forward within a month. They could decide to change the team in the same company or they could resign and change the company.

Snehali had looked for opportunities in other teams in the same company but Neerav had decided to move to another company. It was 15 days after the meeting that he made his decision public and had served a notice of another 15 days. Snehali had wished that Neerav would stay in the same company but she knew she was no one to give anyone advice about their career decisions and hence had not let her disappointment be known.

After Neerav left, few times she had vague thoughts about what could have happened between them. It was not like Snehali was hoping for a relationship with Neerav, but sometimes her brain ran of its own accord before she could restrain it. She reminded herself that she was not even sure if they would be meeting each other ever again. She knew taxing jobs could easily take a toll over one’s personal life and only the truest of friends could survive it. She was not sure if Neerav considered her a true friend or just an office friend.

The new team she had joined was great and she enjoyed working with the people there but she had not been able to make a great bond with anyone yet.

She used to miss Neerav during coffee breaks. She would get the coffee back to her seat usually or sometimes take a detour to another teammate’s seat to ask for some help for understanding the details of a task she was assigned. To be honest, she was busy too otherwise she would have contacted Neerav asking for his whereabouts.

It was now when she was reorganizing her stuff that she saw a butterfly wind chime that Neerav had gifted her on her last birthday and she started thinking about him. She remembered bidding him goodbye when he had left the company. They had promised to stay in touch but Neerav had said the same thing to the whole team.

Snehali came back to the present when her brother came to the room asking her if she would go to a movie with him. Snehali had agreed and then she got back to finishing the reorganization of her room. Snehali had unpacked the butterfly wind-chime and had installed it on the window.

Soon after Snehali had finished cleaning up her room, finally stashing everything away. She got a message from Neerav on her phone.

“Hi Snehali, how are you? It has been a month and no message, no call, looks like someone has been very busy.”

Snehali was elated and she sent a reply soon:

“Hello, how have you been? Coffee is not interesting anymore :(. I have been meaning to message you for a long time but could not. I know you must have been busy. But yeah I was busy too. Did not get much time in the last Month. The new project is a big one and there is too much to understand and learn. But how is the new job treating you? I want to know everything about it. “

Soon after she sent the message, Neerav had replied – it was not a long one as Snehali had expected but it was definitely better.

“Let’s meet for a coffee then? I will tell you everything you want to know.”

They agreed for meeting the next day at noon.

To be continued…

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Published by Shruti

I am a Quality Engineer by Profession. A voracious blog reader. If something is of my interest. I can read as many blogs as possible on the subject and not only skim through them, I will read them full. I am also a big google fan. Anything "anything at all" is stuck in my mind and I will go to google.
I see quality in each and every thing. Steve Jobs could make "Apple" the best not just because he could build ground breaking products but because he wanted everything to be of the topmost quality from every angle. A half-baked product and your product might solve the toughest problem in the world but the customer would still look out for other options.
I strongly believe - "If anything can be done in a better way, then why compromise?"
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